The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

3.99 of 5 stars 3.99 · rating details · 3,143 ratings · 330 reviews

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only yea...more

Paperback, 336 pages

Published February 22nd 2005 by Anchor (first published January 1st 2003)

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Jan 26, 2008 Doug Bradshaw rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a remarkably personal and insightful journey which takes us through the loss of hope and faith and then back to a higher realm of love and understanding. Here are my personal thoughts about this book:

1. By the end of the book, I felt a bond with her that is similar to something I have felt for some of my best professors and teachers who helped me understand complex things. Karen is extremely honest and open and able to describe emotions and reactions which many thoughtful people must ha...more This is a remarkably personal and insightful journey which takes us through the loss of hope and faith and then back to a higher realm of love and understanding. Here are my personal thoughts about this book:

1. By the end of the book, I felt a bond with her that is similar to something I have felt for some of my best professors and teachers who helped me understand complex things. Karen is extremely honest and open and able to describe emotions and reactions which many thoughtful people must have to orthodox religious training and dogma. She works so hard to do the right thing and yet she is unable to feel the connection to God and make the decision to accept things as they are. She is the opposite of the normal rebellious person who bolts. She is the long suffering special person who will follow the rules, sacrifice and do the right things over and over again to come up with the expected result of obedience and conformity. And yet, that brilliant and analytical mind of hers cannot allow herself to be tricked or cajoled into compliance. I feel that this is because she is brutally honest and pure.

2. She lets us into her very private and sometimes sad life. We know her every fear and understand that she is shy, awkward socially, and backward, and as she heals and moves to the next level of understanding in her life, we root for her and admire the things she is trying to do. Her accomplishments are huge and she has done it virtually all alone with extreme patience and many setbacks as well as thousands of days carefully studying the history of religion, various poets and other important writers. The ultra close relationship we have with her every day struggles helps us comprehend her conclusions and remarks about spirituality, religion and life. She has taken the time to do what many of us would like to do but can't do because of other more pressing obligations and, perhaps, addiction to regular shallow life things.

3. She is imprisoned by her unknown health problems, her religious obligations, fear and shyness, and yet we see her determination get her to a level of freedom experienced by very few people. She loses her faith, gains a cause to help others understand how religion at a certain level can be damaging, and as she reads and studies each of the three major religions, she gradually moves back to a spiritual understanding that gives her a new freedom and love of everyone. Along the way, she teaches us some of the basics about each of the religions and why we need to understand them before we assume that all others are incorrect and horrible. This gives us hope and makes us want to reexamine and study others and then move to that higher level that is taught by all of them. Certainly, it makes me want to study more about Judaism and the prophet Mohammed's teaching.

I finished the book with a great and positive feeling that there may be hope in the world if we could take the time to truly understand each other. It's a great book. Thanks, Karen. (less)

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Aug 25, 2011 Lobstergirl rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

I feel a little conflicted about Spiral Staircase. For one thing, it's Armstrong's third autobiography. She's a writer whose career started not with the religious histories for which she's now known, but with memoir-writing. Her abandonment at age 25 of a 7-year nun career aroused interest in the publishing world, leading to Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery. This was followed by a sequel, Beginning the World. Spiral Staircase is in many ways a rewrite of Beginning the Wor...more

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Aug 08, 2010 Jana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, spirituality

"Theology is – or should be – a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense." Karen Armstrong

I read The Spiral Staircase a few weeks back between road trips, first to visit an aunt and uncle in a small university community and second to attend an Episcopal peace conference at a mountaintop retreat / convent. The timing of my read of this memoir (about a nun who left the church to pursue graduate work at Oxford only to leave academia and make her way...more "Theology is – or should be – a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense." Karen Armstrong

I read The Spiral Staircase a few weeks back between road trips, first to visit an aunt and uncle in a small university community and second to attend an Episcopal peace conference at a mountaintop retreat / convent. The timing of my read of this memoir (about a nun who left the church to pursue graduate work at Oxford only to leave academia and make her way as an agnostic writing about religion) between these two trips was significant in molding my opinion of the book as were the circumstances and motivations that got it into my hands in the first place.

During the visit with our aunt and uncle, Frank and I shared that we'd joined a radically inclusive and diverse inner-city Episcopal Church, and what a remarkable experience it had been for us. The aunt and uncle (who'd always been so unwaveringly supportive of us through our educational and artistic success and struggles... what with graduate schools, relocations, under-employment and penury) were not pleased. In fact, they were quite appalled that we had joined what they considered a "blood cult" and that we had done something that seemed "so out of character for both of you." Nonetheless, they consoled themselves by saying that it was probably "just a phase" and we would get through it one way or another. (Neither aunt nor uncle were much for religion, especially Christianity.)

And then our aunt told me I should read one of Karen Armstrong's books because it recorded how she had gone through a similar religious phase, even to the point of becoming a nun at 17, but eventually "cured" herself of the debilitating religious condition. Though somehow I'd missed even knowing who Armstrong was, I was excited to be exposed to her books... not in small part due to my fascination with monastic life... Christian or Buddhist or whatever variety... and also that this fascination had been much of the motivation behind signing up for the peace conference at the convent. I really wanted to get even a tiny glimpse into how different monastic communities lived. I had so many mundane and practical questions, not to mention the scholarly and spiritual ones. Anyway, the aunt had a copy of the book, so I dove right into reading it while we were still on our visit.

So... while the familial words were harsh and the expressions disappointing, I was grateful for the book and remarkably un-offended, mostly because I know where the aunt and uncle are coming from. I've been there and felt that baffled confusion as I tried to make sense of other people's religious belief. But eventually not unlike Karen Armstrong (though her life experiences were superficially different than my own, what we'd experienced on a structural level was remarkably similar), I too had come to realize that faith is not about belief, but about practice. "Belief" is really more of a fundamentalist and literalist concern. Spiritual practice is something else quite entirely, and while some practices are solitary and others have the support of a religious community, practice is essentially about ritual, repetition, movements of the body, states of the mind and compassionate action.

As Armstrong says, "Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing."

Anyway, I found the book to be a compelling read not just for the scholarly and spiritual content, but for the story itself. I particularly enjoyed reading about her stay with an academic couple from Oxford while caring for the couple's autistic son. The glimpses into the functioning of that household and the life of this child were quite strange and beautiful.

And though Armstrong didn't answer most of my curiosity about monastic life, she did afford glimpses into other ways of living and, surprisingly, mirror my own evolving spirituality. And at this point, I would have to disagree with our aunt who said Armstrong was somehow "cured" from religion. Seemed to me that Armstrong only became more conscious and thoughtful about religious practice.
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Sep 04, 2008 Aldean rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, religion

The first book I read that helped me realize that I was not alone in my experience of post-seminary difficulty. Armstrong's account of leaving the convent was so powerfully analogous to my own experiences that I nearly wept as I read (something I only do on very rare occasions), both with remembered pain and grief and with joy that there was nothing peculiarly wrong with me or my experience as a refugee from a life of professional holiness.

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Jan 21, 2011 Tim Titolo rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I am a fan of Karen Armstrong. Her contributions to religious history are very large. And I always took her as presenting evidence fairly while not being prejudicial to one or other particular religion. I have read many of her books.

The Spiral Staircase was intimately entertaining. I always knew of Armstrong's experience in the convent and rejection of the same but the book goes on into much more detail of her experiences.

She says, at one point, that if Satan were mythology and God was mythology...more

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Jul 31, 2012 Ruth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Ruth by: Book club choice

Many of us seem to be searching for more meaning in our lives and look for answers in a living God. Karen Armstrong showed remarkable courage in exposing her soul in her lifelong search for a connection with a God she could not identify. Her years in service as a Nun were at the least, disquieting, and at the most destructive. The author’s struggle for enlightenment is expressed in her own words….”When I entered my convent, I thought I had embarked on a mystical adventure …..but instead of findi...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Every once in a while, I get around to reading a book that surprises me because the author has put into words things that I have felt the urge to say, but not had the words for, nor had ever seen in print. Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is one of these books. If a soul could be said to have emotional strings, then Karen's book resonated with those frequencies in mine, and this made the book a breeze to read.

It had sat on my shelf for several years befo...more Every once in a while, I get around to reading a book that surprises me because the author has put into words things that I have felt the urge to say, but not had the words for, nor had ever seen in print. Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is one of these books. If a soul could be said to have emotional strings, then Karen's book resonated with those frequencies in mine, and this made the book a breeze to read.

It had sat on my shelf for several years before that. I had feared an intellectual treatise on religion and someone's struggles with obscure doctrines that I ought to know something about or might be curious about in a tangential way. What I got instead, from the very first chapter, and continuing almost without interruption to the conclusion, was a very personal account of the inner workings of a mind and a heart that struggled passionately through great confusion and frustration to deal with such mundane problems as eating enough, finding a job to support herself financially, and alongside that, defining a personal spirituality and discovering a mission in life. She concludes by sharing her experience of awakening to meaning in religious stories and rituals, an experience whose potential had been nearly beaten out of her by the harshness and inattention of those whom she turned to for answers, guidance, and help, though ultimately her understanding transcended any one particular religion and become a faith in the practice of compassion itself.

She recounts with a depth of understanding seldom shared publicly, how each door was closed to her in life, despite her hard work and persistent efforts to do the right thing by conventional standards and describes how she strangely met a much bigger success by defying convention and dedicating herself to an unpopular project that she knew was right for her to complete. And how the success in itself was not as important as getting a message out that she feared was not being heard. Having experienced not being heard many times by what seemed to be responsible people, Karen, a true "wounded healer," can hear what is going on in our world and our inner lives and offers a uniquely human perspective, which is flawed at times and deeply perceptive and deeply healing at others, like humans are in real life.

One reviewer wrote how people familiar with therapeutic frameworks might think it were pretty standard stuff to read of Karen's discovery that "her frugality was a subconscious manifestation of her belief that she didn't have a future, that she was not going to be able to earn her own living." I would say the reviewer did not have to anticipate being alone in her admiration of such insights, that even seasoned therapists and their clients can be a little awed because they were arrived at, not on a therapist's couch, but on a personal path in very undramatic moments of living day to day. Karen Armstrong's memoir encourages us all to find our personal path in life, the one that might lead to a mission that influences people on a global scale, or just make us a better person in our own lives. (less)

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Mar 24, 2011 William rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: uk, nonfiction, memoir, autobiography

Karen Armstrong is a bestselling author in the field of religious history. Some of her more popular books include A History of God, The Battle for God, and more recently The Case for God. This is her memoir about life after leaving the Catholic church. She was a nun. It's a wrenching story. Armstrong, for reasons not clear until much later in her life, entered a novitiate at age 17 with a great belief in her capacity to find God. The discipline was brutal, the nuns, whom she describes as fundame...more Karen Armstrong is a bestselling author in the field of religious history. Some of her more popular books include A History of God, The Battle for God, and more recently The Case for God. This is her memoir about life after leaving the Catholic church. She was a nun. It's a wrenching story. Armstrong, for reasons not clear until much later in her life, entered a novitiate at age 17 with a great belief in her capacity to find God. The discipline was brutal, the nuns, whom she describes as fundamentally good people, small-minded and vindictive. She stayed for seven years. It was an initiation that ended up damaging her for life. When she left the convent she was in no way prepared for secular life. The convent had not only insulated her from the real world, it had all but erased her ability to think independently. At Oxford, she found she was very good at writing papers that discussed the ideas of others, but these papers were always devoid of her own ideas. The ironies pile up here at such a rate that the reader is left a little breathless. When she begins to faint periodically at the convent the nuns chalk it up to her selfishness, her penchant for self-dramatization. For years, at Oxford, she sees a psychiatrist who is so locked into the ideology of his discipline—he sounds like a Freudian—that he can't look beyond it to her real problems. He always sees her trouble in classic psychoanalytical terms. Years later, after she faints in public and wakes up in the hospital, the doctor there is astonished that the psychiatrist had never ordered a simple EEG as a means of ruling out organic causes. There is one too: epilepsy. Before this diagnosis though she is implicated--falsely--in what appears to be a suicide attempt. This is 1964 or so. The attitudes in Britain at that time toward her perceived "self-indulgence" were positively barbaric. The hospital nurses barely veil their contempt, since she was after all someone "who wasn't really suffering." They never quite say it, but it's as if they view her as a malingerer. Anyway, it wasn't mental illness but a neurological syndrome: epilepsy, probably due to oxygen deprivation at birth. The doctor keeps her in the hospital for two weeks trying different drugs, and finds the right one. Soon she feels better. It's when she moves into the writing phase of her life that she begins to heal psychically from damage inflicted while a nun. Working day after day with the great texts from all three monotheistic traditions, she begins to experience the transcendent sacredness always denied her as a nun. I found the writing vivid, direct, persuasive, always pulling me along. If my interest ever flagged it was only briefly during the post Oxford years, when she was teaching at a private school. There's considerable humor here and knowledge of the period which is necessary if we are to understand the ultimate success of her spiritual quest. (less)

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Dec 15, 2007 Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars

From Publishers Weekly
In 1962, British writer Armstrong (The Battle for God, etc.) entered a Roman Catholic convent, smitten by the desire to "find God." She was 17 years old at the time—too young, she recognizes now, to have made such a momentous decision. Armstrong’s 1981 memoir Through the Narrow Gate described her frustrating, lonely experience of cloistered life and her decision, at 24, to renounce her vows. In its sequel, Beginning the World (1983), she tried to explain her readjustment to...more

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Apr 29, 2007 sphamilton rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anybody interested in religion, whether a believer or not

Karen Armstrong started off as a nun, and now - long after she left the convent and rejected her Catholic faith - she is a theologian who still doesn't go to church. What she's interested in is human beings' conception of God, how they use it, and what the common points are in the major world religions. She writes about her life, but above all she writes about her passion for scholarship and discovery.

A couple of bits from the book that really struck me, and made me think a lot about popular co...more Karen Armstrong started off as a nun, and now - long after she left the convent and rejected her Catholic faith - she is a theologian who still doesn't go to church. What she's interested in is human beings' conception of God, how they use it, and what the common points are in the major world religions. She writes about her life, but above all she writes about her passion for scholarship and discovery.

A couple of bits from the book that really struck me, and made me think a lot about popular conceptions of religion:

"To my very great surprise I was discovering that some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God. Many of them preferred to say that God was Nothing, because this was not the kind of reality we normally encountered. It was even misleading to call God the Supreme Being, because that simply suggested a being like us, but bigger and better, with likes and dislikes similar to our own."

And, talking about the fact that an obsession with theological orthodoxy seems to be confined to Christianity:

"Hyam Maccoby had given me a clue six years earlier... He had told me that in most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed." Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy, in other words.

In all the religions she has studied, she points out, the core activity which changes you and (in however small a way) changes the world is the practice of compassion. And it's the acid test of theology - a theology which causes you to act with compassion is an effective theology. A theology which causes you to act with hatred or anger is bad theology.

Lots more to think about apart from this: whether you're interested in religion or not, it's a central human activity that can't be dismissed out of hand.
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Oct 29, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, religion-and-sprituality, biography-autobiography-memoir

A nun’s tale. Armstrong tells of her experience from her seven years as a teenager and then young nun in the convent through a loss of faith, severe physical and mental challenges, trying to find her way in the world as an academic, and ultimately coming to a new understanding of spirituality. It is a reasonably quick read. I found that I was very interested at times, and at others just going through the motions. One notable absence here is any real detail on her experiences with men. She notes...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Laila rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Laila by: Book Group

Shelves: book-group-picks, memoir, read-in-2009, spirituality

I enjoyed this book more and more the deeper I got into it. Karen Armstrong is such an appealingly intelligent and slightly odd person. A fascinating memoir.

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Mar 31, 2009 Melanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Before Karen Armstrong became an authority, both learned and accessible, on the religions of the world, she spent seven years in a convent. Her first memoir, Through the Narrow Gate, recounted those seven years. This book takes the reader beyond those years. through a period of intense sufferings and trials, and to the point where she discovers her true vocation.

The first part of this book recounts the end of her time in the convent. The brutal and, sometimes, absurd practices of the nuns numbed...more Before Karen Armstrong became an authority, both learned and accessible, on the religions of the world, she spent seven years in a convent. Her first memoir, Through the Narrow Gate, recounted those seven years. This book takes the reader beyond those years. through a period of intense sufferings and trials, and to the point where she discovers her true vocation.

The first part of this book recounts the end of her time in the convent. The brutal and, sometimes, absurd practices of the nuns numbed her mind and undermined her judgement. Ordered to practice sewing by a superior, she was punished for telling the older nun that the machine had no needle. ("You will go to that machine...and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.") When she developed fainting attacks, complete with auras, she was told that she was looking for attention and sent to bed in disgrace. She lost her religious faith and faith in her academic abilities at the same time that her conscious mind became unreliable.

When she left the convent, she was emotionally exhausted and physically ill. Although she never thought that the fainting spells and terrifying visions were religious, she did believe what her doctors told her: they were "anxiety states" that could be treated by psychotherapy. (One doctor's words: "As long as you keep producing these 'interesting' psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you're not that interesting.")Her initial experiences in the outside world were unsatisfying and frightening. She tried to hide her lack of worldly skills with "a hard, intellectual manner that, [I:] thought, provided me with some protection." The spells grew much worse as she began to find herself in places or situations but had no recollection of how she had gotten there.

Help came on a strange path: a job as a babysitter for a bright young boy with autism and epilepsy. Although her Oxford thesis had been rejected, although she began to relinquish hope for a normal life, and although she attempted suicide, she received a gift - a strange gift, but a gift, nonetheless. She fainted in a subway station and was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. No longer were her fainting spells, hallucinations, or unremembered activities a sign of emotional instability: they were physical symptoms of a brain insult, and they could be treated like any other physical illness.

"I could have been as emotionally stolid as a sloth and it would have made no difference," she writes. "For many people, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness."

As she recovered from the strain of years of needless suffering, she began to be interested in religion again. Commissioned to write and host television pieces about religion, she began to investigate and re-think all she had been taught. Her research began as an academic exercise, but led her from one surprise to another.

Historical scholarship about the New Testament led her to realize that not even Paul had considered Jesus divine: "... even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters." Her research expanded to other Abrahamic faiths, and, later, to Eastern religions.

As for Judaism :"From my earliest years, I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension... [Jews:] could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments."

A Jewish advisor, Hyam Maccoby, led her to understanding that Christianity (especially the Catholocism she knew best) did not have the same structure or expectations as other religions. "Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Within reason, you can believe what you like." Instead, he said, Jews have "orthopraxy": "right practice rather than right belief. That's all. ... It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don't bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead."

Her research and understanding of Islam ("surrender") led her to realize "we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound way essential to our Western identity.... Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were."

Ultimately, Armstrong developed her own philosophy of religion, including her conclusion about the religious ecstasy that can be found in stepping outside of one's own ego, and developing a compassionate nature that is brought to bear in all of one's dealings with the world.

Armstrong continues to research and write about religion in a way that causes this "spiritual agnostic" understand and admire its achievements even while its abuses have changed the world - especially the modern world.(less)

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Mar 10, 2013 Allison rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

This is a far, far better book than The Narrow Gate. Not in terms of literary quality, both are equally good there, but in terms of depth and personal connection. In The Narrow Gate, Armstrong is frequently detached from her experiences, speaking of "the girls" and "they" even when she was a part of the events she describes. Here, she is actively involved in seeking, and she brings us along with.

The first quarter of the book or so contains many scenes that were featured in The Narrow Gate, so y...more

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Feb 25, 2013 Marjorie Thelen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

This book by Karen Armstrong, one of many she has written, is about her transition from life in a convent to the outside world. She entered the convent in 1962 as a teenager and left seven years later. She struggled tremendously to make the decision to leave a life she no longer felt relevant. She questioned the very existence of God. She writes,
“He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist.” (p 61)
While in the convent she started an undergraduate degree at Cambridge...more This book by Karen Armstrong, one of many she has written, is about her transition from life in a convent to the outside world. She entered the convent in 1962 as a teenager and left seven years later. She struggled tremendously to make the decision to leave a life she no longer felt relevant. She questioned the very existence of God. She writes,
“He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist.” (p 61)
While in the convent she started an undergraduate degree at Cambridge. When she left she continued her studies and had to adjust to secular life at university in the 1970s. Her questions about God’s existence continued as well. She writes,
“Did I really believe that there was a Being up there somehow responsible for everything that happens on earth? No, I did not. Not only did it seem highly unlikely that there was an overseeing deity, supervising earthly events, apportioning trials and rewards according to some inscrutable program of his own, but the idea was also grotesque.” (p 111)
She describes her crisis of faith, her movement away from God and the church in subsequent events in her life. What is fascinating is her return which came as she studied and wrote about other religions. She was commissioned by Channel 4 in England to do a series on Christianity and started with the “pugnacious apostle” St. Paul, who she considered had “perverted the simple, loving message of Jesus”. But in her research for the series she “stumbled unawares into the minefield of New Testament scholarship, whose findings astounded me”. (p 231) And she “made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion.” There were more discoveries and she writes that “once I had been introduced to these ideas, I read the gospels and epistles with new eyes. . . . These ideas gravely undermined many of the theological assumptions of my Catholic years.” (p 232)
It was the study of the Crusades that changed her, “making me determined always to try to listen to the other side . . . Studying the Crusades had confirmed me in my conviction that stridently parochial certainty could be lethal, especially in religious matters.” (p 259)
There are too many great revelations in the book to include in a short interview. I include just one more. Toward the end she writes,
“In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering ‘the truth’ or ‘the meaning of life’ but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to ‘get to heaven’ but to discover how to be fully human. . .” (p 271)
In the end Armstrong comes full circle. Her journey is a fascinating one. She an excellent writer and ponders many of the tough questions we all face. I would recommend reading any of her books or watching one of her talks on TED. This book is so thought provoking, I think I’ll read it again.
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Jul 16, 2012 Rebecca rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was taken by the first paragraph of The Spiral Staircase, though I was wondering what had overtaken me to loan the memoir from the library. Only two days before I had told myself, “Enough of the serious books, get something light.” Then I heard Armstrong talking on the radio about the Charter for Compassion she is involved with, and her Twelve Steps to a More Compassionate Life. I had read her book Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, so with near zombie-like compliance I just went to the li...more I was taken by the first paragraph of The Spiral Staircase, though I was wondering what had overtaken me to loan the memoir from the library. Only two days before I had told myself, “Enough of the serious books, get something light.” Then I heard Armstrong talking on the radio about the Charter for Compassion she is involved with, and her Twelve Steps to a More Compassionate Life. I had read her book Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, so with near zombie-like compliance I just went to the library and checked it out.
Not a page turner because of story, The Spiral Staircase is a thoughtful recitation of steps taken as an adult that led her to her unusual and exclusive niche of writing about religion to the popular market. After leaving a nun’s life at age twenty-three, her life is a series of steps and missteps that only slowly took form, and when it did, it happened with quiet day-to-day living, not drama-laden, tabloid fodder.
It is a studious peek into a woman’s life who made her way to success not by planning it, but by picking her way through adjustment to life that repeatedly closes options behind her. She left the convent because she did not find God there, had an eating disorder, and her master’s thesis failed after years of work. Nor did she find success with teaching, journalism or filmmaking. She had deep fears of not being normal that were discounted by a psychiatrist for years until she finally discovered she did suffer from a form of delusional epilepsy.
Strewn throughout and initially unobserved by her, were small events that turned her life with sleight-of-hand movement. It took friends to point out her talent for writing she was unable to see. During her drifting employment she learned piece by piece what would be important to know when she finally began writing her books in earnest.
Armstrong has great capacity for research and a mind that sees similarities through differences that she believes should bring people to more peaceful community living. Toward the end she gives her insights into the “Abrahamic” religions of Jews, Christians and Muslims, mixing it with myth and bits of Buddhism and Hinduism. It is her gift to hold the strings of each one and offer ideas that could make sharing this planet earth a bit easier.
Her life is a quiet one attuned to silence and study, and with that capacity she is able to sprinkle thoughts throughout her writing to encourage thoughtful page turning.
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Jun 25, 2012 Paul Dinger rated it 4 of 5 stars

A very compelling follow up to The Narrow Path. Part of what I liked about this is finding a kindred spirit in Ms Armstrong who's books I do enjoy. When she writes about being a nun, I don't think she realizes in what light she puts them in. This book often has her defending the catholic church from...well what she says. This is also a compelling book about finding faith. It is thru historic study of comparitive religon where she makes this discovery, one wonders what Pascal would think of that....more

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Mar 18, 2012 Pranada Comtois rated it 5 of 5 stars

I love Armstrong's books and her memoirs are especially important for several reasons. First because the world needs more woman's spiritual narratives. Second, the honesty of how a serious spiritualist faces the rituals and dogma of faith and wrestles them down within their actual life experience is edifying and can inform our own journey.

As a spiritual activist for women's rights in secular, as well as religious and spiritual, worlds, I'm grateful Armstrong is forthright. More women need to do...more

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Sep 25, 2011 Joanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Spiral Staircase is a sequel to Karen Armstrong's The Narrow Gate. Both are memoirs. The Narrow Gate tells of Armstrong's years as a nun; The Spiral Staircase of the years that followed. Transitioning from life in a convent to life outside was frightening and painful for Armstrong, involving losses that were generally not evident to those around her. I strongly identified with her as she described the immediate absence of security upon leaving the convent, the slower realization that she no...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Gail rated it 5 of 5 stars

What an inspiration for someone like me!! Do I dare to write in a public forum that I have recovered from a 'wounded mind?' That is exactly what Karen Armstrong has done in this book. She describes her girlhood and young adulthood living cloistered in a Roman Catholic convent with very rigid constraints and little intellectual stimulation. Later, she is enrolled in University and subsequently leaves her religious order. Throughout her young life and early adulthood, she suffered debilitating sei...more What an inspiration for someone like me!! Do I dare to write in a public forum that I have recovered from a 'wounded mind?' That is exactly what Karen Armstrong has done in this book. She describes her girlhood and young adulthood living cloistered in a Roman Catholic convent with very rigid constraints and little intellectual stimulation. Later, she is enrolled in University and subsequently leaves her religious order. Throughout her young life and early adulthood, she suffered debilitating seizures and blackouts--until finally, well into adulthood, she is diagnosed with epilepsy. The book jacket says she was then "given proper treatment, and released from her "private hell."

Meanwhile, as she was living this challenged life, her sublime intellect was percolating. She endured horrible tragedies, including being denied her degree because of a corrupt academic.

But then what happened? This book chronicles the trajectory of Karen Armstrong's life to that of being a world-class theological historian and intellect, and a celebrated historian and author. This book preceded her ascent to being the winner of the annual TED Talks award to present a WISH to the world--during which she launched The Center for Compassion, a global initiative to effect peace through ecumenical inclusiveness and activism.

But back to the inspiration. I too have suffered and floundered with a wounded mind. But like Karen Armstrong, I was treated and recovered--and indeed it was a 'Climb out of Darkness." But Karen Armstrong inspires everyone. She writes in the chapter 'To Turn Again,' that

"If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice... . Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that be bring out our own heroic potential."

Then she writes:
"Thus, the myth of the hero shows that it is psychologically damaging to live in the wasteland. If you slavishly follow somebody else's ideas, you will be impoverished and impaired. I had certainly found this to be the case in my own life. Blind obedience and unthinking acceptance of authority figures may make an institution work more smoothly, but the people who live under such a regime will remain in an infantile, dependent state."

WHAT A STATEMENT FOR OUR TIMES. I had honor of being able to kneel beside Karen Armstrong's chair after she made a presentation at a church I attended and tell her that she was an inspiration to me and that in her example I found great hope for building a life where I can stand with a straight back and head up before God. (less)

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May 11, 2011 Lee Harmon rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a new sequel to Karen’s first book, Through the Narrow Gate, after the first sequel, Beginning the World, flopped. Because, she says, she was “not truthful.”

Perhaps Karen overcompensated on the “truthful” part this time around. The result is a brutally honest autobiography of a repeat failure. At one point, Karen despairs, “I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. … Even God, for whom I had searched so long, is simply the p...more This is a new sequel to Karen’s first book, Through the Narrow Gate, after the first sequel, Beginning the World, flopped. Because, she says, she was “not truthful.”

Perhaps Karen overcompensated on the “truthful” part this time around. The result is a brutally honest autobiography of a repeat failure. At one point, Karen despairs, “I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. … Even God, for whom I had searched so long, is simply the product of a faulty brain, a neurological aberration.”

Karen spent seven years as a nun in a Catholic convent, then tried to put God behind her and enter the secular world of London. Yet, God would never quite go away. God hung around in a love-hate relationship until Karen finally faced her demons, and found religion again … this time in writing about God. Faith, Karen learned, is not an intellectual assent but an act of will, a deliberate choice to believe. Believers (among whom Karen confesses multiple times she is no longer) cannot prove or disprove their doctrines, but must consciously decide to take them on trust.

One of Karen’s shortcomings as a nun was that she could never connect with God through prayer. There was simply nobody on the other end. Many years later, she realized she was looking for God where he could not be found. Faith, she came to understand, is not about belief, but about practice. Religion, says Karen, is a “moral aesthetic,” an “ethical alchemy.” If you behave a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. You will not discover them to be true until you put them into practice in your own life, where they compel you to act in such a way as to bring out your own heroic potential. Faith, Karen now believes, should make you more human, not less.

On the very last page, Karen looks down to find that, while she has climbed out of darkness, she has come full circle. The Spiral Staircase. “As I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light.”(less)

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Jan 20, 2011 Shannon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bio-memoir, philosophical

A friend loaned me this book and said it was good. She said, "It's about this nun who leaves the convent and what she goes through afterward." That sounded pretty dull. I'm not a religious person, but neither is my friend, so I thought I'd give it a try. I was hooked on the first page. It may be a bit hard to believe, but this book was a real page-turner for me. Three different times I sat in the bath until the water was almost cold because I couldn't stop reading. Armstrong entered the convent...more

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Jul 10, 2010 Heather Williams rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-about-religion

Karen Armstrong is one of my favorite religious thinkers and scholars, and I loved this window into her personal life. The Spiral Staircase tells the story of her return to secular life after 7 years in a convent. (Her time in the convent, where she desperately sought but ultimately failed to find God, are the subject of her earlier memoir, The Narrow Gate). She's so thoughtful and smart, a true academic, but also honest and deeply compassionate. I loved that in the last 15 pages of the book she...more

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Jul 03, 2010 Nancy rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's interesting: I think I read this book several years ago (although it is possible I read THROUGH THE NARROW GATE, her previous memoir, instead). If I DID read this one, clearly I have changed since that time, because this time, it was Armstrong's struggle with faith that hit me hardest, and what I remember last time was being simply mesmerized by her account of life as a nun. Which is horrifying, by the way! When Armstrong talks about life as a nun - and as an ex-nun - and how her formation...more

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May 01, 2010 Kathryn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, spiritual

(Warning: this one's going to be a little long. Feel free to skim.)

This is the second religious book I've read that was written by a woman, the first one being "Take This Bread", by Sara Miles. I liked the tone of both of them, very down-to-earth and conversational. I also noticed two major points that both books shared. One of those (and this is something that many theologians from all three Abrahamamic religions agree on) is that compassion and helping others is CENTRAL to being a good Christi...more (Warning: this one's going to be a little long. Feel free to skim.)

This is the second religious book I've read that was written by a woman, the first one being "Take This Bread", by Sara Miles. I liked the tone of both of them, very down-to-earth and conversational. I also noticed two major points that both books shared. One of those (and this is something that many theologians from all three Abrahamamic religions agree on) is that compassion and helping others is CENTRAL to being a good Christian, or Jew, or Muslim. Following rules is all well and good, but if your religion leads you to be hateful, intolerant, and smug then you've missed the whole point. (You'd think that would be fairly self-evident, but just read the stories in the news lately.) The other point is how counter-productive it is to be CERTAIN about anything concerning religion. Sara Miles compares this to churches who seem to treat God as a computer program that only THEY have the passwords to. Karen Armstrong refers to it as "claiming a monopoly of truth". We can't know anything for certain about God, we just can't. There are religious theologians who say it's more accurate to say that "God is Nothing", because there is nothing we can compare God to, no possibly analogy that will even come close to being accurate. So pointing to something specific like birth-control and saying that God absolutely will condemn someone to hell for using it is...pretty damn silly, actually.

I think one of the things that surprised me the most about this book was the almost complete lack of bitterness. Karen spent SEVEN YEARS in a convent, and the experience effectively broke her into pieces. And yet while she's very blunt in her description about what was wrong with how nuns were treated, she seems to view it more as being completely wrong for HER specifically, and not necessarily wrong for everyone. She went to the convent with an inquisitive mind, and was trained to believe that *thinking* and *faith* could never combine. She was sensitive and often lonely, and was made to feel that the only way to survive was to cut off her feelings. Worst of all, she suffered from epilepsy, and NOT ONE PERSON for years thought she might be suffering from something physical. So she ended up isolating herself from everyone to hide the fact that her fainting spells, hallucinations, and occasional fugue states (one leading to a suicide attempt that she still doesn't remember) were all due to her "wanting attention". God only knows how, but she survived all of this, as well as the grueling experience of having to rejoin "normal" life after leaving the convent. The book is about all of this, but it's also about how she left God and religion for good and all, never going back to that, nope. And then how she came back.(less)

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Dec 17, 2009 Jon Stout rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: religion

After reading Muhammad a Prophet for our Time Eminent Lives by Karen Armstrong, I’ve become a Karen Armstrong enthusiast. The Spiral Staircase is her autobiography, and provides the shortest and most personal access to understanding how she got to her current position of being an interpreter of religious tradition in the face of its “cultured despisers” Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. If forced to speak in the most literal terms about a being within the universe, Armstrong...more After reading Muhammad a Prophet for our Time Eminent Lives by Karen Armstrong, I’ve become a Karen Armstrong enthusiast. The Spiral Staircase is her autobiography, and provides the shortest and most personal access to understanding how she got to her current position of being an interpreter of religious tradition in the face of its “cultured despisers” Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. If forced to speak in the most literal terms about a being within the universe, Armstrong is an atheist, but she believes that religious language is not meant to be interpreted literally, but rather expresses myth, ritual and the commitment to practice a particular kind of life.

For seven years Armstrong was a Roman Catholic nun, and though she was devoted and intelligent, she chafed at the mind-numbing obedience required. She was also epileptic, although her symptoms were not diagnosed until years later, and her superiors were small-minded in grasping her situation. She left the convent for an academic life, a difficult adjustment, and was also frustrated there, though showing great scholarship and talent. She emphasizes throughout her story that she made advances in her life only when she gave up preconceived expectations, and simply was grateful and open to being where she was.

She eventually advanced to a career of television documentaries and writing books on topics in comparative religion. She started out being critical in a feminist and “Dawkinsesque” sort of way, but eventually began to appreciate the religious traditions she was investigating, including her own. She attained a deeper understanding of both Judaism and Islam by doing a documentary in Israel, and has become a spokesperson of themes, such as compassion, that unite the Abrahamic faiths. She has also examined fundamentalism, in the context of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in a diagnostic but not condemnatory way.

I am currently reading The Case for God by Karen Armstrong for a more nuts-and-bolts examination of the role of religious language and tradition, without taking it to be pseudoscience. Among the questions: What has been the traditional conception of God, if not a theistic conception?
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Sep 05, 2012 Ivy added it

I haven't read any of her earlier biographic works so it was with only having seen her on Youtube videos, and knowing her books about "God," that I went into reading this book that I simply could not put down.

Perhaps I feel a little empathy, because her voyage of discovery to learning about other religions than that of her youth was similar to my own, that I was able to identify with both her confusion and depression, and her feeling of relief when she realised that she didn't have to fight reli...more

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Mar 29, 2010 Melanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

I'm drawn to books in which people discuss their spiritual and psychological struggles. I'm also drawn to books about people who struggle with religion and belief (because I do too). This book is that and much more.

It is about a woman who spent seven years as a nun, then left the monastery, suffered a nervous breakdown, suffered for years with undiagnosed epilepsy, and got turned down for a doctorate at Oxford.

But the most remarkable aspect of the story is that, after rejecting her faith, she en...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Sue rated it 5 of 5 stars

Karen Armstrong is one of the most acclaimed religious historians and a popular commentator on affairs of faith.

Her memoir, 'The Spiral Staircase: my climb out of darkness', is an extraordinary account of how at age 17 she entered a convent, ‘eager to meet God’, but after seven desperately unhappy years as she left the order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But ‘convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating.’ S...more

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Jul 31, 2012 Longfellow rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: five-stars

The Spiral Staircase prodded my brain into thinking and stirred my dormant, meditative resources. This memoir covers Karen Armstrong’s seven-year experience as a nun and her departure from the convent, her difficulty assimilating the secular world into her life, her eventual goodbye to Catholic faith, and her discovery of a significant life pursuit.

The Spiral Staircase is a wonderful accomplishment. Armstrong’s descriptions of internal thoughts and feelings and of external events are vividly re...more The Spiral Staircase prodded my brain into thinking and stirred my dormant, meditative resources. This memoir covers Karen Armstrong’s seven-year experience as a nun and her departure from the convent, her difficulty assimilating the secular world into her life, her eventual goodbye to Catholic faith, and her discovery of a significant life pursuit.

The Spiral Staircase is a wonderful accomplishment. Armstrong’s descriptions of internal thoughts and feelings and of external events are vividly relayed. The book’s structure is a delight: each chapter title alludes to a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, and in sharing the content of her life, Armstrong illustrates and clarifies some of the implicit meanings of Eliot’s poem.

I doubt all audiences will receive this memoir as I have, but anyone who vacillates between wanting a conventional career path and a path less predictable will ponder—once again—how this all works and may even wonder how one figures these things out. For Armstrong, it seems, ambivalence and serendipity have been partners in directing her journey. And anyone who has questioned or is questioning faith will find plenty of ideas on which to reflect. Her writing on this topic is compelling because she avoids the dogmatic forcefulness so typical of both those with and those without faith. She has given up the certainty that at times can look so ugly on either side, immersing herself instead in the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual experience that is the reality of being alive. Her motive is not to convince but to share, as the subtitle “My Climb Out of Darkness” would suggest.

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive toward such things
. . .
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

. . .

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are . . .

-T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, I
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About Karen Armstrong

British author of numerous works on comparative religion.

Elsewhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ar...
http://www.islamfortoday.com/karenarm...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/kar...

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

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Books by Karen Armstrong

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

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“If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. ” — 64 people liked it

“Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.” — 22 people liked it

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